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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Intel Discusses 22nm Xeon, Haswell Chips for Data Center

While much of the Intel Developer Forum focuses on client computing, Diane Bryant, general manager of the company's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, had a number of data center announcements. She also discussed upcoming versions of the Ivy Bridge 22nm technology for Xeon servers in 2012 and an upcoming Haswell-based microserver processor. She said Intel is creating the next generation data center based on open standards.

Above: Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel's Datacenter and Connected Systems Group

Intel is now sampling 22nm versions of its Xeon E7 and E5 server processors, a server version of the Ivy Bridge technology, which will ship in 2013. The next generation of these processors will include a technology called APICv, designed to reduce the number of entrants and exits from virtual machines and thus improving performance.

For microservers, the company now has 45-watt and 17-watt low-power Xeon E3 processors, and these will be replaced in 2013 with a 22nm Haswell version. Even smaller, the company will be shipping an Atom SoC server version—a 6-watt processor called the S-series and known as Centerton—later this year. It will be replaced with a 22nm version known as Avoton next year with a fabric designed for placing multiple processors.

Bryant also announced SeaCliff Trail, an open platform for software-defined networking, including a reference board based on a Core processor, data acceleration chips, and recently acquired Fulcrum's Ethernet switch technology.

On security, she announced that the company is bringing its Deep Defender platform (developed with Intel acquisition McAfee) to the server, combining server virtual containers at the hardware level with security applications. The company will offer more details next month.

With Xeon E5, Intel announced its Trusted Execution Technology to ensure that virtual machines have not been compromised. Now, many more companies including VMware and Citrix are supporting it.

Bryant spent a lot of time talking about high-performance computing. HPC needs were doubling every year, but silicon technology is only doubling every two years (known as Moore's Law), she said, so it needs technology that does "more than Moore."

Since 1997, the performance of high-performance computers has gone up 10,000 times at ten times the power. One-thousand times more computing per watt over the next decade will enable new applications.

She talked about the Xeon Phi co-processor, known as Knights Corner, and said a pre-release version rated it in the top 150 on the TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers. It was rated number two on the Green500 list of the most-energy efficient ones. Bryant talked about Intel's range of HPC capabilities, spanning the Xeon E5 and Phi processors, as well as recent acquisitions of Whamcloud's Cluster software and the fabric teams from Cray and QLogic.

Bryant said high performance cluster fabrics will be the limiting factor in moving to exascale computing, so Intel is very focused on innovating and then integrating fabrics, based on the Cray and Qlogic teams as well as the Fulcrum low-latency Ethernet switch technology.

Jay Boisseau, director of the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) described the organization's Stampede project, which will be the first large-scale deployment of Xeon Phi using pre-release versions of the processor.

Launching on January 7, this system is planned to deliver 10 petaflops of computing power using Xeon E5 processors and Xeon Phi coprocessors, plus massive memory and disk. It has a lot of empty slots for future generations of the Xeon Phi. By next June, he expects Stampede will be in the top five or so systems on the TOP500 list. This is designed to run hundreds of projects by thousands of researchers. Funded by the National Science Foundation and built by Dell and Intel, it will run projects such as hurricane prediction, deal with turbulence simulation for more efficient planes and cars, and simulate molecules for medical weather research. The problems researchers have don't fit on any systems today and they will continue to want more processing power. E5 works with the applications that are around today for general purpose microprocessors, while Xeon Phi offers tremendous potential performance for highly parallel applications while being easier to port to than GPU computing options.

On big data, Bryant talked about how Intel is focusing on real-time analytics, both using distributed file systems such as Hadoop and in-memory analytics. Intel makes contributions to Hadoop and is now distributing Hadoop in China for telecom operators. In addition, she said, the company provides solid state drives and just acquired the makers of CacheWorks, designed to help SSDs in big data.

To talk about utility supercomputing, she brought up Ariel Kelman, head of worldwide marketing for Amazon Web Services, which introduced infrastructure as a service back in 2006. Last November, the company introduced Custom Compute Instances, based on Xeon E5, with the ability to reach number 42 on the TOP500 list. Kelman said you can make the TOP500 list today with 290 instances, costing $73 per hour.

He explained how NASA's Mars Curiosity rover uses telemetry data; how Yelp uses more than 200 nodes to optimize ad placements through clickstream analytics; and how Schrodinger is working with Cycle Computing on drug research, analyzing 21 million potential drug compounds against a single target cancer protein. Schrodinger would have had to spend $20 million on hardware before cloud computing, but now it can use 50,000 Xeon E5 cores, enabling the company to do 12.5 years of research in three hours at under $5,000 an hour.

Bryant also talked about Intel's commitment to open standards, bringing up BMW's Mario Muller of the Open Data Center Alliance to talk about open standards. He said that BMW will be introducing a new data center in Iceland for HPC based on ODCA standards that will be carbon-free, using 100 percent renewable energy. Bryant discussed Intel Cloud Finder www.intelcloudfinder.com designed to match enterprises with cloud infrastructure service providers.

Finally, Bryant announced Intel's Intelligent Systems Framework 1.0—a technical specification for working with the "Internet of things." She talked about how there are so many devices gathering information these days and the challenges companies face working with all of the data that is now available. Intel has worked with Six Flags to handle data from its surveillance cameras to improve security in real time, and to integrate point of sale systems with inventory systems so stores can be restocked before they run out of product.

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